My historical novel, with a young woman growing up and defending an imagined Sharia Compliant Muslim Matriarchy is out now! It's called "Under The Full and Crescent Moon"

My novel "Under the Full and Crescent Moon", has been published in Canada and is available in paperback there with a US release 21st October and the UK coming by the end of the year, but the ebook is available worldwide! I really hope some from this sub will check it out as I'm kinda afraid of posting it in other Islam focused subs 😅

It's the story of a young woman growing up and there's a lot of Islamic legal concepts and controversies tackled. You might wonder how I made it Sharia compliant and here's an excerpt from the Author's Note at the back that provides an explanation:

Sharia, as we know it today, is embodied most famously in the four main classical Sunni schools of law. These started to coalesce a few hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Before this time there was a wider variety of legal practice in the various regions where Islam had spread. This is examined in The Sources of Islamic Law by John Burton. Some of the competing philosophies that are important to this story, the ahl- al- hadith and the ahl- al- ra’y are alluded to by Burton, but more explicitly detailed in Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought by Daniel W. Brown.

This novel is set in that early period of the Islamic Golden Age before the classical schools of laws were fully established. This corresponds to the ninth century CE, or third century Hijri, after which, as Brown notes, “We find hardly a word spoken in opposition to the main tenets of the classical doctrine of sunna.” This was a time where Muslims grappled with questions on how to uphold the word of God in the novel situations they encountered and answered them in differing ways in different regions. The characters in this novel then are not working within the framework of the classical Sunni schools of laws. Their debates and disagreements are a fictional take on the real arguments that were taking place at the time as what we now consider to be core Islamic practices spread to different communities of early Muslims at different times.